1 Typeface. 110 Animators.

Purveyors of animated typography, Animography, have released their latest project Franchise Animated:

For this specific animated typeface we have round up 110 talented animators from all over the world. We asked every animator to pick a glyph and animate it using no more than 4 colors, 25 frames and a 500 x 600 px canvas in Adobe After Effects. The animators had complete freedom to work their magic within those 25 frames. The result is a wide variety of styles and techniques. The color palette and letterforms tie it all together.

Even Motionographer has its own animated title!

Best of all, it’s free. Hooray.

The Animators

(Click to go to the Vimeo credits page)

The Process

Calango, the force behind Animography, shared some of the process behind the project.

Phase one
The approach to Franchise was a bit different than Animography’s typical process. Normally, an idea arises and after some rounds of sketching and experimentation, the animated typeface is produced. Most of the glyphs are animated in the same manner, forming a coherent animated type system.

In this case, they wanted to create something more surprising. They searched the web for a suitable typeface and settled on Franchise by Derek Weathersbee. After getting him on board, they invited admired animators and asked them to recommend other animators. Each animator was assigned one glyph and got a template and a set of rules.

Phase two
Here’s where things got tough. Phase two was the daunting task of coordinating all the contributors, making sure they followed the rules and delivered their files on time. The delivery deadline was postponed a few times and converting everything back to one single CS5 file took some time as well.

When all the individual animations were finally added to the master file, everything had to be cleaned up. This included deleting all kinds of unused layers, effects, solids, etc. After that the file was reorganized, color coded and prepared to work smoothly with characteristic, making it a neat file for end users to work with.

Finally, all the promo material could be made. For this, Clark Rhee and Sono Sanctus swiftly got on board to produce some top quality audio. Nextm the guys at Giphy offered their help by hosting animated gifs for each glyph on their site.

Get It

The file contains all the keyframes, expressions and artwork from the artists. Get it here.

What’s the intended use? It would have been nice/useful if the animations were more deliberate, not so arbitrary + just intended to look cool. Even the selected typeface quite generic. If the typeface is (allegedly) inspired by store signage isn’t that a great opportunity for animation?